Working XFS Windows Driver/Application? Paragon? ( itimpi? )

[dev_guy]

@itimpi posted a few times he was unable to get Paragon's Linux File System to read XFS drives from Unraid. He submitted a support ticket with Paragon but I've not seen any posts regarding the final outcome? There are a few posts here saying it works with Unraid XFS drives and around an equal number saying it did not work.

 

In my case Paragon can't even see an Unraid XFS drive let alone mount it. Interestingly, I took a spare otherwise identical drive, formatted it with parted to XFS, and the Paragon utility mounts it just fine. Same model drive, same USB dock, same everything. There seems to be something unique to Unraid's use of XFS that's preventing it working with Paragon.

 

I looked at both drives with several disk utilities from the Linux command line and I can't see any differences yet one will mount in Windows and the other won't. If anyone knows the secret to getting Paragon to mount Unraid XFS drives, please let me know? Or, for that matter, if anyone has found another utility/driver that works for read-only XFS in Windows?

 

In my case this is for data copying, de-duplication, and re-organizing. There are simply better tools for Windows than Linux for those tasks otherwise I'd just use Linux. I am aware I could run Linux in a VM and share XFS drives back to Windows but I expect the performance would be poor and I'm working with 36 TB of data.

 

I've looked into other utilities. The most promising is Linux Reader from Disk Internals. The demo version will let me "mount" an Unraid XFS drive, and can display the files, but not do anything with them which is presumably a demo limitation. It's mainly designed for data recovery but might still work if the paid version (thirty bucks) actually works. It's appears to open an XFS drive as a virtual drive much like you might with an ISO. It does not appear to be the sort of native OS file system mount that Paragon offers.

 

I'd prefer the Paragon solution as it presents Linux drives as native Windows drives just as if they were NTFS (and works great with Ext4). If I decide to spend the money for Linux Reader I'll report back how well it actually works. I haven't found anything else that's free, or has a free demo, that will mount an XFS drive in Windows. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Edited November 13, 2022 by dev_guy

[dev_guy]

UPDATE: Linux Reader by DiskInternals as an alternative to the non-working Linux File System by Paragon.
 

I went ahead and paid for Linux Reader and can say it sort of works with some important limitations and issues. As I suspected, it is opening an XFS drive as a virtual file system which inhibits performance. The performance with a large number of small file operations, like indexing the drive, is about half the speed of a natively mounted drive. The performance copying large files, however, is good enough to saturate a typical USB 3.0 external drive dock (i.e. around 120 MB/sec). I've yet to test a natively SATA connected drive.

 

Worse, at least for my needs, it will apparently only let you "mount" one drive at a time. It opens a dialog box when you mount a drive under a drive letter (which is the only way to make it available to other Windows applications) and you can't close that window, or do anything else with Linux Reader, without un-mounting the drive first. I don't see any way to mount multiple drives at once. As I mentioned in my first post, it's clearly intended for data recovery where that's less of a limitation.

 

At least with Ext4 drives, Paragon lets you mount multiple drives with no issues. It would be awesome if I could do the same with Unraid XFS drives but, so far, Paragon can't even see the drives (see my previous post).

 

While natively within Linux Reader it has the physical drive size correct, the "mounted" volume in Windows is reporting I have 12 TB of data (around 8.5 TB in reality) on my 10 TB XFS drive. And the actual drive size is reported as 20 TB. So I'm not sure where the disconnect is but it doesn't seem to inhibit access to the files. With an Ext4 10 TB drive with less than 3 TB of data, the drive reports correct size info in Windows with the Paragon driver but it reports as a 9TB drive that's completely full with 9TB of data under Linux Reader. So it's not just an XFS thing.

 

I doubt any low level file operations are going to work though the virtual file system which might also be why sizes are reported wrong. So, for example, a lot of backup software likely won't work. If that was your goal, I'd suggest booting RescueZilla from a thumb drive which should be able to make a compressed image of an XFS Unraid drive. And, as others have suggested, you can do a lot booting a suitable "live" Linux distro like Ubuntu or Mint, or Parted Magic's USB drive, or other Linux-based USB "rescue" drives. But you can't use your favorite Windows tools with any of those.

 

Linux Reader at least somewhat works where Paragon's option (at least for me) hard fails. But I'd much rather have Paragon work like it does with Ext4. But, if you're desperate, I'd suggest trying Paragon's free demo first and, if it doesn't work, you'll have to pay for Linux Reader and cross your fingers working with one drive at a time.

 

In general, I'd suggest if you ever want to work with one or more drives in both Windows and Linux, to choose Ext4 if at all possible as XFS is a purple unicorn on Windows. XFS is an ancient file system from Silicon Graphics which finally went bankrupt in 2009 and XFS dates back to 1993 making it roughly 30 years old. While Ext4 was first released in 2008 and is around 15 years newer than XFS. The two offer similar features and performance so I see little reason to use XFS where you can avoid it. We also need a more SSD friendly file system. Unraid doesn't even officially support the use of SSDs in the array and older file systems tend to be hard on SSDs and have unnecessary overhead.

 

The other credible, but more expensive, option for those looking for just data recovery might be UFS Explorer which comes in a basic home version starting around seventy bucks. They have a RAID version which can possibly handle things like an Unraid BTRFS RAID1 mirrored cache pool even in Windows.

Edited November 13, 2022 by dev_guy